PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (18 page)

In Ira’s face, especially in the narrow, tawny triangle scored by her eyes and the bridge of her nose, he can nearly make out her late father’s. The truth is that Vsevolod Vsevolodovich cut a more handsome figure, the flecks of Tartar blood lending his features elements of gallantry that in his daughter have transmuted to insipidity and coarseness. His dignified bearing was something European. An accountant at the chemical factory for more than thirty years, he conducted himself like a government minister, circumspect and ostentatiously discrete. Even as a pensioner, as the contents of his good black business suit diminished, he strolled through the neighborhood coldly surveying its clotheslines and livestock. Liquor never moistened his lips, not even at Vasya and Ira’s wedding banquet, not even for the first toast.

There is White Eagle and Red Lion. Also Birch Fire, Troika, Star of the North, Tundra Gold, Rasputin, Russian Roulette, and, if someone else is buying, Ivan the Terrible. The bottles are poised like ICBMs beneath the
kiosks’ rusting, corrugated metal roofs while, somewhere else, ICBMs are poised like bottles beneath the rusting roofs of missile silos. His hands parenthetically at his temples, Vasya peers through the dense glass that, even when clean and unscratched, refracts the objects several degrees from the plane of the material world. Single exemplars of foreign goods line the shelves, Czech chocolate cherries alongside a box of French tampons, German condoms in taunting juxtaposition with ajar of Polish pickles.

Someone nearly invisible, usually a girl, works within each kiosk, whose goods are identical to those of its neighbors but are arranged in a slightly different permutation. The spectral presence who possesses the second kiosk from the corner especially excites Vasya’s imagination. What is she doing in there behind the money hole, before he raps on the vitrine to summon her attention? He stoops low to announce his choice and within the kiosk’s gloom there is a rippling glimmer of lipstick, a glint of eye-light, and, perhaps, even more briefly beheld, an expanse of skin well below her neck. His posture is unsupportable for more than a small fraction of a minute and the medium between them is too thick for conversation; he straightens and points to the consumer object of desire. He places his money in the trap in front of the hole. A creamy-skinned hand, long and bejeweled, slides open the little glass gate, emerges from the hole, and slithers around the bills. Its nails are lacquered vermilion to remind him that they can draw blood. The hand withdraws as silently and languorously as it has come. Now it passes among the shelves, lightly caressing the packets
and bottles, until it rests on his choice. It pauses there for a moment. And then the hand reemerges, embracing the object. He would like to stroke that hand but once, as if by accident, as he accepts his purchase.

The kitchen is laid out like a long box (a cigarette pack, a shoe box, a
coffin),
its ceiling low and sooty, its fixtures grease-streaked. Crinkled strips of paint peel from the walls. The cupboard totters over the buckling wooden floor. Wash soaks in the basin’s scummy gray water.

The heat of the day has released the kitchen’s odors and sensitized the nerves along the lining of Vasya’s nostrils. Sour milk pools at the back of his tongue. A cloying sweetness rises from the washtub. The paint’s lemony tang stings his eyes.

Vasya recently acquired a toaster oven. Two weeks later he had to sell it. He insists now that they took a very small loss on the appliance, but the counter space it occupied has been left unfilled as a standing rebuke.

The second was a botch, less than a year ago, its bloody and tissue-stained details kept from him. But before the telephone receiver even reached his ear, his mother-in-law had flooded the kitchen with frenzied accounts of her daughter’s ill treatment in the hands of rude nurses, complaints about hygiene, demands for money for bribes, calls for fresh sheets and nightgowns, and implied and explicit
accusations of his own complicity. Vasya hadn’t seen Ira during her entire month in the hospital. Men were kept out of the women’s ward for sanitary reasons. It was also for sanitary reasons that he hadn’t been allowed to send candy or flowers, though afterwards Ira accused him of not having the money for them, which was true enough, but was not the determining factor.

The first: early spring, early morning, early life. The top of the snow melted the day before and has refrozen overnight, leaving a translucent glaze. Already the sun is working on the ice. Wisps of steam huff off it, patches puddle. Vasya halts on the dry sidewalk by the schoolyard and takes a step onto the berm. His boot crashes through the frosting and finds the cake beneath it spongy and moist. Little clumplets of snow bunch around his laces. He smiles at them and then hurries along, catching up with the shadow-Vasya who hasn’t stopped for the experiment.

He crosses the hospital driveway and passes through the double rubber-sealed doors into a waiting room as dim as a tomb. Thinking he’s early, Vasya stops at the doors and waits for his pupils to widen. There’s a distinct interval, perhaps seven or eight seconds, between the moment he begins to admire the slight, rounded form of a girl stooped over the counter signing a document of some sort, and the moment in which he identifies that it belongs to Irina. Perhaps he has mistaken her for a schoolgirl, two or three years younger than she actually is. The murk evaporates around the room’s places of incandescence and reflection. Her black hair, gleaming as if wet and unencumbered by bows or berets, falls down the
sides of her face. Only the tip of her nose is visible, hardly recognizable as a nose.

Straightening for a moment, she turns and sees him. He hasn’t promised to be here, nor acknowledged anything at all, yet she doesn’t seem surprised, only pleased. The pleasure is as clean and lucid as the ice. He returns the smile, sensing that his own expression exercises nearly every muscle and tissue in his body. While Ira completes the document, the bespectacled matron behind the cashier’s counter offers him a glance that is friendly and congratulatory. For what, Vasya doesn’t wonder. Then, without saying a word, Ira hands him her suitcase, puts her arm in the crook of his and they step from the building, their strides long.

The cries, shouts, threats, sighs, and moans, the mayhem and the lovemaking, are translated into Russian and voiced over by a single announcer. The English sound track murmurs on underneath.

The video player runs all day in the darkened bedroom, regardless of whether anyone is watching it. Vasya and Ira enter sleep with the films’ reflections flickering on the walls and in their dreams.

They own nine videocassettes, each of which they have watched scores or even hundreds of times, attenuating the recording so that the drama is played now against a staticky, ethereal landscape. But Vasya rarely sees a film from beginning to end. Rather, he glimpses it in fragments, its scenes out of order, the violence
seeming to operate without cause and effect, just as it does in real life.

Vsevolod Vsevolodovich’s death leaves Ira’s mother alone in a tottery, battered two-room house with a monthly pension of about 200,000 rubles. For years the house’s roof has leaked, streaking the walls first green, then a kind of grayish blue, then an intimately organic yellowwhite, and it seems that the walls’ decomposing paint and plaster will pass through all the shades of the rainbow before enough money is collected for a
remont.
Then a raging late-winter storm tears off a chunk of the roof and the ceiling below collapses onto the bed. At the time, Ira’s mother is taking refuge at a neighbor’s.

Having worked with crude, ready material and even less adequate skill, Vasya knows that his repairs won’t survive a summer downpour. Ira’s mother moves into her other room, and she once again fidgets in her place on the queue for new housing. Ira’s parents had applied for an apartment in one of the already decrepit five-story
khrushchevkas
in the year of Brezhnev’s death.

Vasya is sent to the chemical factory to plead with the chief to use his influence to help her jump her place on the list. It’s a matter of justice, he’s been instructed to say. He brings with him an envelope jammed with documents, including Vesevolod’s Party card, his twentyeight
—twenty-eight!—
letters of commendation for dedicated work, and, in a small black case, laid on purple velvet, his war medals. The chief refuses to meet him. In
the overbright anteroom, Vasya is made aware of the tenuousness of the material that comprises his slacks and the constraining fit of his sports jacket. He smiles dimly at the chief’s bosomy middle-aged secretary.

Incredibly, she doesn’t remember his father-in-law, but she attends the particulars of Ira’s mother’s plight with sympathy. Suddenly, in a rush of emotion, Vasya begins telling her about matters that have nothing to do with the waiting list. He can’t check himself. He’s still talking twenty minutes later, trying to explain the
situation,
when the chief steps from his office on his way to lunch. Vasya hurriedly shuffles to within his field of vision. The chief’s a grim young man not much older than Vasya. Frowning, not looking Vasya in the eye, he replies that there is nothing he can do, times have changed, and he goes on his way. Vasya is embarrassed and, without another word to the secretary, he too leaves. He heads down the corridor in the opposite direction as fast as he can move without running.

He returns home, where Ira and her mother stand vigil. A minute later, her face empurpled, Ira’s mother is threatening a stroke. Her rage is directed not at the chief, but at Vasya. She doubts he has pleaded her case properly, presented all the documents, especially the twenty-eight letters of commendation, or shown the chief the necessary deference. She suspects that Vasya has not even gone to the factory, that he has spent the afternoon in the park. Indeed, Vasya’s breath testifies that he has recently shared a bottle with some acquaintances, but that was on the way home. And she accuses him of not really wishing to help, his supposed reluctance born from resentment
of her late husband’s rectitude. And it is true that, despite his initial discomfort, Vasya has taken a modest, delicious pleasure in having failed. And though the next storm will blow the miserable witch into Ira and Vasya’s apartment for good, this predicament conspires to work in his favor, because she’s Ira’s mother, another weapon to use against Ira.

His search for weapons suddenly leaves him fatigued. He flexes his fist again.

“So, that’s agreed,” Chernomyrdin is saying. “Now, Vasily Yegorevich, I propose that we begin by discussing the situation in its entirety—”

Vasya cuts him off.

“I want a bus.”

The prime minister is silent for a moment.

“A bus?”

“And not one of your shitty army buses, either. A good one, with a full tank of gas.”

Chernomyrdin’s hand covers his mouthpiece, blanketing some quick, urgent interrogatives. Then, with a burst of static, the hand is removed.

“This can be arranged,” Chernomyrdin says.

“No tricks,” Vasya warns.

“No tricks.”

“And I want safe passage.”

“Yes, that’s agreed. But to where?”

Now it’s Vasya’s turn to fall silent. This choice is some kind of sophisticated Moscow treachery, invented by the
security organs. Without a map, forced to make a decision on the spot, Vasya won’t be able to formulate the correct response. And how can he think in this furnace of a kitchen, with his shirt stinking like a corpse’s, with bombs exploding and bullets flying in the next room? He curses himself for his inability to plan ahead. Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachayevo-Cherkessia, Zhezkazgan: place-names tumble through his head like chunks of concrete.

His wife has looked away, showing no interest in the conversation. She gazes through the window at the impossibly empty blue sky. Her face turned so that he cannot see the bruise, Vasya is reminded of it.

He blurts: “Portugal.”

“That’s impossible,” Chernomyrdin replies at once. “Portugal is a member of NATO.”

Vasya wonders if he is right. The prime minister is known to be poorly advised, especially about foreign affairs. But he sounds very sure of himself.

“Portugal,” Vasya repeats. “Or there’s no deal.”

Chernomyrdin is gone from the phone a long time. Vasya bitterly regrets that he has chosen Portugal, but if he compromises now, Chernomyrdin will think he’s weak.

Ira says, “I want a bus too.”

Vasya smothers the receiver with his chest and whispers furiously, “Don’t interfere, these are sensitive negotiations.”

She scowls. Chernomyrdin comes back on the line.

“It’s agreed,” he says. “But we will issue a statement denying that our agreement involves any political concessions.”

“And I need a hostage, for my own safety.”

“What, you don’t trust me?” Chernomyrdin sounds hurt.

“I’m sorry, Viktor Stepanovich,” Vasya says tactfully, “The state and the governmental organs have lost large measures of public confidence. In general, this reflects society’s loss of faith in established institutions and traditions.”

“All right then. But it has to be voluntary.”

“My wife volunteers.”

“And the government accepts no liability for your actions, nor for its own. And I must speak to Irina Vsevolodovna, to confirm her willingness.”

Vasya slides Chernomyrdin across the table. Ira lifts the receiver with a limp hand, her eyelids heavy.

“Yeah,” she says.

Vasya hisses, “It’s the prime minister!”

Irina doesn’t change her expression. She is either listening to Chernomyrdin or is about to doze off.

She says, “Uh huh.” And then: “Yes, I agree. My own responsibility.”

She hands the receiver back to her husband.